"Machete don't text..."

Danny Trejo looks like Charles Bronson would have if he'd spent a couple of years working out in a prison weight room and then fell into a cement mixer. A former San Quentin inmate turned actor, Trejo's badass charisma inspired Robert Rodriguez to deliver the mother of all Mexploitation faux trailers in Grindhouse, so incredibly cool it just had to be expanded into feature length.

Machete is the most satisfying time I've had at the movies since Avatar. Rodriguez is having the time of his life directing and like his Planet Terror half of Grindhouse, does an uncanny job of shooting and editing in full-blown early-eighties late-seventies style -- a guy completely in love with action movies, Machete is overflowing with references to other pulp movies, from Rolling Thunder to Cool Hand Luke and especially Mr. Majestyk.

Trejo is fantastic and carries the movie with incredible ease and conviction. Make no mistake, the movie is incredibly tongue-in-cheek (at times the tongue may even pierce the cheek), but Trejo is all business and the toughest guy ever to grace a movie screen since Vinnie Jones. He's old school antihero and a force of nature in a hysterical yet satisfyingly insane revenge fantasy. I give you my personal guarantee, you won't see a more gleefully violent movie this year.

Machete immediately gets started in high gear, delivering the best James Bond style origin prologue in ages, introducing Machete's arch-nemesis, Steven Seagal -- when you hear the sound effect Seagal's sword makes, you know you're in for a killer experience.

Michelle Rodriguez is terrific, but it's Jeff Fahey who steals the movie -- Fahey must have somehow travelled back to 1985 to shoot his part, how else to explain that his every freaking pore (and superbly gelled mullet) seem to radiate eighties villainous baddassery? He's fantastic to behold.

The one cringe-inducing part of Machete is the substantial role given to Jessica Alba. Her time onscreen makes for some rough-sledding, to be sure. But the movie moves at such a quick, violent and inventive clip, it's easy as hell to forget about her -- especially when Michelle Rodriguez comes back in the picture.

Machete delivers. If you've been pining for a REAL action movie that remembers when, cut off a slice and pass the peppers.

SONS!

Season two of FX's sensational Sons of Anarchy outlaw biker series exploded onto DVD/Blu-ray shelves yesterday. I called ahead to have my friendly retailer hold a copy for me, and it's a good thing that I did, as there was one lone copy left when I got there: "You're like the 30th person to get this today!"

If you're in withdrawal feeling all caught up on Dexter and waiting for the next go-round of Breaking Bad, this is your series! Hellboy himself, Ron Perlman, leads a fantastic cast of antiheroes. We discovered this series near the end of season 2 last year and promptly went and devoured all of season 1 on disc, getting severely hooked. We actually blew through 3 episodes in a row last night and the quality continues to rock and rock hard. Secrets and dark deeds abound in season 2, with an awesome guest turn from Henry Rollins as a scary white supremist.

If you haven't bit into Sons yet, fair warning -- you will get hooked. It's a terrific pulp saga that is as much of an outlaw as the characters it portrays. Season 3 starts next week, so get hopping! Look for a guest appearance soon by Stephen King, likewise a huge fan of the show!

Eyes-a-poppin!!!

As one of the snooziest summer movie seasons of all time is about to wind down, glimmers of what lies around the corner are starting to emerge! Check out two of the coolest looking trailers to unspool, post Comic-Con...

TRON LEGACY (link)

WOW!!! The Tron design aesthetic is crazy cool. Looks like a true modernization of that old goofiness from the original. If they pull it off, it could be akin to the contrast between the old and new Battlestar Galactica. Positioned right at Christmastime, if the buzz keeps building this could turn out to be a massive IMAX-fuelled hit.

SUCKER PUNCH (link)

Loved what I saw in here. Zak Snyder is a visionary cat and I will happily go on record to say that I think he deserves a medal for what he pulled off with Watchmen. Sucker Punch evoked Terry Gilliam’s Brazil as well as Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow and seems completely immersed in surreal retro comic book eyeball drip. Pretty wild!

What say ye?

The unforgivable crime: missing this film...

Every now and then you see something so fresh and well made that it manages to immediately sink its claws into you, leaving no doubt that you're seeing a modern classic. The last time that happened was with the sensational Let the Right One In. It just happened again with A Prophet (Un prophète), the best thing to happen to crime and gangsters since season one of The Sopranos.

A Prophet has the raw vigor of Scorsese's Mean Streets and is such a refreshing lesson in craft and economy, it puts most recent films to shame. The Grand Prix winner at Cannes, A Prophet follows Malik (Tahar Rahim, in virtually every scene) from his first day in a French prison, where survival draws him into the service of an aging Corsican mafia boss, learning all the while, often at extreme peril.

French director Jacques Audiard must be flooded with offers after his work here. While very much an old school tale of hard boiled crime, the movie feels completely fresh and inventive and new. Malik may remind you of young Michael Corleone at times, though it may ultimately be DeNiro's young Vito (from II) whose footsteps he follows the closest.

PLEASE don't let the French subtitles and any lack of familiarity with Arab/Corsican culture keep you from seeing the best mob picture in ages. Imagine a really raw episode of Oz or The Wire blended with Goodfellas and La Femme Nikita era Besson and you'll have an idea of what lies in store. No opportunity is wasted, a lesson that Malik and director Audiard have both clearly mastered. Highly recommended.

Khan-tacular! Trek in the Park 2010: Space Seed!

It's no exaggeration to say that in the middle of its second summer run, Trek in the Park has become a bona fide Portland phenomenon - a tradition that should have a long and happy life!

The brainchild of Atomic Arts and director/Captain Kirk, Adam Rosko, this year finds yet another classic Original Series Star Trek episode performed live and for free in the crowded-to-exploding outdoor setting of Portland's Woodlawn Park.

Kirk, Spock and McCoy are wonderfully played by the same three actors who originated the roles in last year's Amok Time. This year the cast has been joined for Space Seed by the phenomenal Ryan Castro as Khan Noonian Singh, who inhabits the role with exactly the right amounts of genetically superior superman ego and sly Montalban homage. Costumes and props are amazingly accurate, right down to the Botany Bay crew jumpsuits to the Starfleet dress uniforms.

Trek in the Park has a small army of sponsors now, including Bridge City Comics, The Portland Mercury and ...Pabst Blue Ribbon! This is wonderful to see, but be advised, the word is out and so are the crowds.

Make no mistake, miss this production at your own peril. The cast and crew are spectacular and completely embody the phrase "labor of love." The show continues for two more weekends through August 1st, Saturdays and Sundays at 5:00.

As the show is free (you can buy fantastic T-shirts!), you'll want to get your landing party planted in the amphitheater at least two hours before the show to have a prayer of seeing things from up close. My advice, pack up and get there early...and prepare for a fantastic experience.

Here are a few highlights...

More Cheese, Stewardess...

When shag was king, being an airline pilot was the coolest occupation a kid could aspire to. So it may be memories of that childhood icon of the pilot as hero that led us to recently revisit some of the Airport movies.

It might be hard, but if you can put your Airplane! parody goggles on the shelf, it’s fascinating to look at these movies as time-capsules of seventies culture and Hollywood’s endless appetite for sequels.

Little did they know, but Airport (1970) would become the template for the entire burgeoning disaster movie genre. It all began here with pilot Dean Martin, Jacqueline Bisset, Burt Lancaster and George Kennedy as cigar-chomping “Joe Patroni,” who appeared in all four films. Pilot Martin’s affair with Bisset’s stewardess has taken an unexpected turn (for them, if not the audience), someone on the plane has a bomb and Kennedy is determined to make anything mechanical do his bidding: “That's one nice thing about the 707. She can do everything but read." Airport is a classic of the era and was always an event when it aired on TV growing up. By far the classiest, least contrived of the series, it was wildly popular and holds up beautifully.

Things really get hopping in Airport 1975, with Charlton Heston in full-on Omega Man mode, aviator shades and leisure suit safari jacket as “Alan Murdock” – now that is a manly name! You’ve got a singing nun, Hare Krishnas and Linda Blair as a transplant patient. But the real reason to scream is when a mid-air collision requires stewardess Karen Black to fly the plane. “THE STEWARDESS IS FLYING THE PLANE!!!” One of the classic disaster movies, it’s over the top, contains a huge amount of the material mocked in Airplane! but really captures the era and never stops trying to entertain.

Airport ‘77 is a kitchen-sink plot explosion featuring Jack Lemmon, Jimmy Stewart, Christopher Lee (as an ineffectual cuckold! Say it ain’t so!), Brenda Vaccaro and Darren McGavin, blustering around like he just walked in from the set of The Night Stalker. Terrorist/robbers take over the plane, which crashes into an off shore oil rig (not another one!!!) sending the plane plunging into…the Bermuda Triangle!!! – which doesn’t really figure into the plot at all, but hey! The survivors are trapped in the sunken fuselage, à la The Poseidon Adventure, their rescue in the hands of a special group of short-shorts wearing Navy commandos who are evidently based out of Fire Island. Billionaire Stewart’s plane is like a private hotel lobby, with no expense spared – there’s even a blind piano player in the bar! Kept waiting for McGavin to suddenly go all Kolchak on Lee (“Wait a minute, you’re Dracula!!!”), but that never happened. Everything else pretty much did!

The series wraps up with The Concorde…Airport ’79, with Alain Delon, blink-and-you’ll-miss-her Charo, evil Robert Wagner and Jimmie Walker. A seemingly endless sight gag is Martha Raye’s charge for the bathroom, evidently gripped by the worst attack of diarrhea in movie history. Even more nausea inducing is John Davidson’s creepy “tongue-first” kissing style with his Soviet gymnast girlfriend. Shudder…The greatest thing about this movie is the footage of the actual Concorde supersonic plane in flight, which was a pretty spectacular piece of engineering, sadly no longer flying. Which is a shame, considering how amazing the plane apparently was at dodging jet fighters, missiles and performing barrel-roll evasive maneuvers. This time Kennedy takes the controls, because no Frenchman’s gonna out-fly an American! Petroni is all man, bedding hookers in Paris and making with such bon mots as, “They don’t call it the cockpit for nothing.”

If you haven’t seen an Airport movie in a while, and if you love the Seventies, they are pretty fascinating to behold and truly capture the flamboyance of the era. All four films are available in a reasonably priced Terminal pack for added convenience.

And if you ask me, pilots are still some of the coolest guys out there. Whenever I travel, I'm always reassured seeing the seasoned flightcrew up at the controls...so long as its not Karen Black!

When there's no more room in hell, the dead will walk the Earth...

Back in my February 6th posting I mentioned my unbridled glee at news of Robert Kirkman's killer cult comic The Walking Dead being turned into a new TV series on AMC (Mad Men, Breaking Bad) by none other than Frank freaking Darabont!!!

Well a week ago, this pipe dream began shooting on location. Here's a taste of the kind of mayhem that awaits when this sucker hits AMC in October. Thank you, Frank, thank you!!!